An investigation into cultural factors associated to mental illness and the influence they have on help seeking behaviour.

Abstract

Western theories of mental health and illness dominate current models of psychological intervention in South Africa. South Africa is a culturally diverse context and its residents make use of multiple African traditional meaning systems to organise and understand their experiences; including their beliefs about mental wellbeing and how to support and intervene. The understanding of mental illness cannot happen only within the framework of Western paradigms. If there are to be more universal understandings of mental illness; it is imperative to take into account variations in how mental illness is not only understood, but also to understand culturally informed practices and interventions of mental illness. The intention of this study was to explore the influence of cultural beliefs and practices associated to mental illness and the influence they have on help seeking behaviour. This exploratory qualitative study focused on eight caregivers' subjective experiences of childhood mental illnesses, which were gathered through individual, face to face semistructured interviews. A thematic content analysis was used to analyse the data. Parents drew on both Western and African meaning systems to make sense of their children's mental health problems but there was a lack of integration of these understandings. Cultural practices and rituals emerged as potentially important to consider in understanding how parents conceptualise their children's mental health care needs. Parents seem open to alternative forms of help-seeking, including professional mental health care; however, such services are not always accessible or affordable which may result in perceptions of such services as unhelpful or irrelevant to parents. It is evident how important it is to consider African approaches to mental health and wellbeing when considering the experiences of parents whose children have been diagnosed with a mental illness as this would enable health care professionals to understand children and families through a more personalised and holistic paradigm instead of making generalised assumptions based on one social group.